Now that the Republicans have taken over the House of Representatives, we have a chance to put the brakes on the reckless deficit spending of Barack Obama. The Republicans need to listen to the message the voters sent in 2010, or they will not have a good year in 2012.

As tea parties began popping up around the country, Leftists began to complain that the only reason that there is concern about the debt is that "there is a black man in the White House." It is true that conservatives didn't raise enough of a stink about the deficit when Reagan was President, or when George W. Bush was President. But let's look at the numbers, because it's about more than just the fact that there were deficits under Reagan and Bush. The size of the deficits, led by the extravagant spending of Obama, is the issue.

According to Barack Obama's own website, the total of all the deficits under Ronald Reagan was $1.491 trillion. The total of all the deficits under George W. Bush was $2.005 trillion. The deficit for 2009 alone was $1.412 trillion. The projected deficits for 2010 and 2011 are $1.555 trillion and $1.266 trillion, respectively. Again, these are Barack Obama's numbers, not mine.

The fact of the matter is that federal deficit spending is out of control and we need to put the brakes on all of this reckless spending. The path we're on is simply not sustainable, and one has to wonder why Barack Obama has continued to go down this destructive path without implementing the deep spending cuts that are needed to at least bring the annual deficit down to a reasonable number.

None of this has anything to do with Barack Obama's skin pigmentation, and the screeching that this is all about race - a tactic meant to intimidate opponents into silence through character assassination - has failed and only served to motivate the Tea Party and the conservative base. We need to keep up the pressure and demand that the federal government spend less money - because the problem is not a lack of revenue. The problem is spending.